We went to the beach this morning. Chris was concerned because it was extremely overcast. He's now at work, sporting a sunburn. I got a bit crispy on the backs of my legs but Phil seems unscathed.

The other night we headed to the beach to watch the sunset, but got there a few minutes too late. We did wander around the shore for a bit, kicking up seafoam with our toes and then wandered down to look at the sleeping pile of seals in the cove.

Other than these little trips, my week vacation with the cherubs was mainly spent in line at DMV. :/ While Chris passed the driving test, his car flunked its smog inspection and the repair place will not get in the parts needed till tomorrow. I offered to pay for this repair since paying for it himself will completely exhaust his bank account.

I don't have the cash to pay for it either, but at least I have a credit card. Additionally, Chris' dad knew before Chris left Washington that there was a problem with the car's electrical system, including the a/c fan, and decided Chris could have these fixed once he was down here (so that I could pay for it). Thoughtful man. We're not getting these things fixed just yet though, because I am pretty sure I can't afford it even with a credit card.

Anyone know any good, reliable car repair places here in San Diego that won't rip an innocent cherub and his mother off? :/

Why can't I meet John Cusack from an online ad? :/

Oh, and for anyone who's curious what resulted from the ad Matt wrote for me: 60 incoming emails. After having Sushi vet the dudes, I wrote back to one guy but a couple of emails later we were both like, "Eh." I showed the emails and photos to Chris yesterday; we both chuckled at "Mr. Angst" whose photo showed a very attractive young (we stress young) man curled up and looking wistful. Or maybe beaten up. Either way he was cute, but that couldn't have been a photo of the guy who wrote. Anyone who looks like that doesn't need to meet chicks online.

I like reading the Wall Street Journal online. There's an article today about folks using the Wayback Machine. I found it amusing since last year I'd taught a legal investigation class wherein I mentioned this as an excellent resource. WSJ concurs :)

Today's middle column story is about police learning crime scene techniques in the Frick Museum. We did something kind of similar in my class, only with Clarence Darrow. But I digress.

This part of the WSJ article had me chuckling: Standing in front of El Greco's "The Purification of the Temple," David Grossi, an NYPD captain, recognized Jesus as the painting's central figure, characterized the scene as chaotic and explained the work's use of light and color.

"The gang unit would probably be called in," he continued. "It appears there's grand larceny here, felony assault there, and Jesus would probably be charged with inciting a riot." Counting 17 people in the scene, he added: "Good thing there are plenty of witnesses."

Yay! Memory card found! Although in a way, it's probably a good thing that I started a brand new game last night as it's been so long that I've forgotten some of the controls.

Off to register the car. :)

A sad, sad discovery. Since I'm on vacation this week, I thought I'd finally, finally finish Final Fantasy X. Except it's not on any of my memory cards. So now, we begin again and it'll take more than one week of vacation to get to the point that I was at before I stopped playing last time.

Waaaah! :( Or maybe, Wakka!

Chris starts work this afternoon. His old manager called down to their local operation and so all Chris had to do was show up. Of course, right now he has no idea what his schedule will be or how much he's making or whether they provide health insurance, but at least he's got his job!

I wish I had cross-ventilation :/ I've been running the a/c these past few days as the boys are totally not used to the heat. I hate it being so hot, but usually I've just put up with it. Can't have my cherubs suffer, though, but I know I'll be cringing when my next electricity bill comes in.

Thank goodness Chris has a job! :D

The contents of my kitchen cabinets are strewn across my bedroom floor. The apartment was going to spray for bugs yesterday, so the cherubs and I spent Thursday night clearing everything out. Except I can't find any evidence that someone sprayed anything. The apartment hasn't returned my phone call and a trip to the office finds them out for lunch. I hate disorder, it makes me anxious.

My sister and I are plottng my trip to Hawaii. It seems like every month something would come up and we kept postponing it. On the bright side, since this trip has been put off for so long, I get to see Loggins and Messina's reunion tour :) So thoughtful of them to consider my schedule.

And also perfect for a reunion tour: Kurt will go with me to the concert. That'll be like our own reunion as well as a sort of first date. We will take along adorable niece Cydney as our chaperone. :)

Photos uploaded. More cats and the train photos. Enjoy!

You know what's sort of ironic, only maybe not?

I'm typing this on my laptop, but I haven't taken it in for repairs yet. I think the gods of computing took pity on me. To repay them, I will not shut the lid on this laptop ever again.

:)

And my elder cherub is here! Chris just arrived about 5 minutes ago. I'm making balsamic marinaded chicken to celebrate. Yay!

Meanwhile, Philip is deeply engrossed in...EQII. Will I ever see the front of his face again? O,o

My squawkbox.tv comments appear to have disappeared entirely, together with the entire squawkbox.tv website. :/

So the train trip; I wouldn't mind doing it again, despite 4 - 5+ hour delays both going and coming. What I would do differently is I would pay for the sleeper car to get a semi-private space. On the way north, my seatmate wanted to chatter the whole time, and I am not a chatter. She was also twice my size and spilt over into my seat without bothering to apologize. I was tempted at one point to ask her to reimburse me for 1/4th the cost of my trip since she took up 1/4th of my seat, but refrained. After a while, she subsided into silence since I wasn't much of a conversationalist.

My conversation specialty is the quaint observation. :) Such as when the dining car opened and the broadcasting announcer repeated several times that anyone arriving to dine without their shoes on would be sent immediately back to their seat, I remarked, "I guess it's okay to arrive without our shirts on."

The scenery is really lovely for long stretches. It would have been more perfect if we'd been able to keep on schedule, as I had looked forward to arriving in Tacoma at 7PM. The sun would still be up and the approach would have been very nice indeed. Instead, we got in at midnight whereupon I found out my poor cherubs had driven to Olympia to greet me, not realizing the Tacoma train station was actually in Tacoma. :/

I'll have to upload some of the photos Phil and I took on the return. Except my camera software is on the laptop which means I have to do some digging around to get that hooked to this monitor in order to actually view them. And yes, I did try to install the software on the XPS, but it errors out and it's too hot now to sit here to figure out how to fix it.

It was so hot yesterday I ran the air conditioner; that will make my electricity bill skyrocket. I cannot afford to live here. It often feels like drowning. If I'd known I'd be living alone for so long, I'd have gotten a much smaller and cheaper place.

Tomorrow my journey begins. :) I am prepared with a whole carryon bag full of snacks. If at all possible, I want to limit dining in the dining car to dinner with Phil. Dinner is spendy, hence the many snacks to carry me through the hours till I get there and back again.

Today, Matt graciously carried the monitor up to my apartment for me. And how did I repay this kind gesture? By handing him my lunch, which soon spilt into his lap and left him looking as though he'd lost control of both bowel and bladder :(

Fortunately, just before we'd left the office, he'd stopped Fannie to see if she had something "for the farts." She gave him some Maalox. Naturally, once we realize the extent of the damage my lunch had done to his pants, we immediately decided that she should be the first person to see what her medication had done once we returned to the office.

I was really sorry; my lunch from the boba tea place was full of fish sauce and Matt's favorite pants will never be entirely clean again. But I couldn't stop giggling, especially when we pulled into the office parking lot to observe a large crowd gathered outside the front door waiting for the lunch truck. We had to walk past them all. Matt wasn't bothered; he found the whole thing pretty funny. Which is a very, very good thing because I couldn't stop giggling. Hehehe!

I wish my cats had opposable thumbs :( Then they could do something useful while I'm struggling to pack away my down comforter like hold open the container rather than sit there grooming their asses in front of me. Darn cats.

My cherub Chris has been sending boxes of things to the apartment. Some of them are really heavy, like the box I had to pick up at the post office this morning. I opened it (the postal worker was kind enough to let me borrow a cart to transport the box out to the car) to unpack it directly into the trunk. He sent me a computer monitor. I am not sure how I am going to lug it up the stairs.

Perhaps now would be a good time to call Matt, who doesn't live that far away, and see what his plans are once he's done with ultimate deathmatch frisbee today. :/

For a little over a month I've been emailing back and forth with Kurt, whom I met back in ye olde high school days. We exchanged phone numbers and he's called up a couple of times, which is a good thing since I'm not likely to pick up the phone to initiate a call myself.

I used to trace this to the days when I worked on the phones at Blue Shield in Hawaii. After talking all day with doctors and patients, the last thing I felt like doing at home was calling anyone on the phone.

That's probably why I don't talk on the phone much, but I've actually never been very big on dialing folks. Even way back when, I hardly called up anyone other than Ruth or Dianne. Everyone else called me (which is funny considering we had an unlisted number; apparently, I passed that number out like crazy). This was long before cell phones and call waiting, so if I were on the telephone nobody else could call us. Sometimes, the guys would race each other to see who could get me on the phone first and then gloat how the other dude was too slow. Occasionally, my mom would have the operator interrupt to tell me to hang up so she could call home :)

I don't remember talking on the phone to Kurt. I'm sure we did; everyone in our group talked on the phone exhaustively, for hours on end. Then again, since I had been pretending I didn't have a crush on him, there's a good chance that I didn't give him my unlisted phone number just to be contrary. On the other hand, guys that I actively disliked had my phone number and called me all the time.

Talking to Kurt is a trip down memory lane because we knew many of the same folks and he's been telling me where so-and-so is now and stuff. Since I don't call people, I tend to lose track of them. :/ Kurt has a great sense of humor. I commented that connecting with him now reminded me of Peggy Sue Got Married and his next note to me started off "Heya Peggy Sue." He's also frighteningly active, both physically and with his volunteer work. It's like talking to someone I know and don't know at the same time.

We're hoping that sometime we'll both be in the same state at the same time so we can have dinner and chat without thinking about weekend minutes and free long distance. I'm looking forward to it.

Our D & D campaign continues and so far, the worst things that have happened to Melodie are that she found red leather armor that made her butt look big (but it sold for 80 gold) and got knocked unconscious by a blob of brown mold. Fortunately, Kevin had the presence of mind (and a much better roll) and could carry her to safety.

I'm not sure I see the fascination with the game itself, which has too much math to be enjoyable for me. The folks who are there are great, though, and that's probably where the fun lies. Todd was trying to convince me the other night that I'd be much happier as a wizard, but I like Melodie. With her high charisma, she is a flirtatious little elf. She only has four measly hit points, though, so I spend a lot of time standing in the back saying, "I'm singing" which is much easier on the ears of my friends than if I actually did sing.

Four boxes of heavy things arrived today from my cherub. I lugged them in from the porch, but that's as far as they go. He'll have to carry them into his room himself. Just over a week away now. :)

I started rearranging the furniture in my bedroom to make room for some of the junk in the other bedroom. As I stood in the midst of chaos, the phone rang. My goal for the day was to get the damn room done before Todd and Amy came by to drop off Griffin. As it happens they were going to Kevin and Candyce's and were letting me off the babysitting hook as well as finding out if I would then go over as well. As I explained my situation, Todd offered to stop by ("It's on the way!" he said, which from his house is technically true) and help me heft my TV.

So with his help, the TV moved...two inches. :/ After consulting with Amy and Griffin, we decided to move the wicker stand and put the TV on my dresser, which resulted in a grand total of two inches of movement, though in actuality Todd had to heft the TV off the wicker stand and then help me push my dresser into place before putting the TV onto the dresser.

Now I'm in the process of trying to decide where things should go next. Do I want to move the big bookcase into Chris' room and pull the MDF-topped flipped-over wardrobe boxes into my room? Or do I just put the books back on the shelves and do nothing else today? I'll also eventually need to get curtains for the room, since no matter which way I tilt the vertical blinds I won't have complete privacy with my bed against the window.

At least that answers one of my concerns: my neighbors can see into my apartment, but they have to stand still long enough and with my new proximity to the window, I shall catch them in the act.

The offshoot of the rearranging adventure is that I slept much better last night than I have since moving here. I think the bed was poorly positioned and that made me feel vulnerable. Now I can see the entire room at once and I feel better.